What Germinates Within
by doodlebug-nimbus
Summary: A look into one of Cloud's reoccurring nightmares. One-shot. Slight body horror and gore.


She shut her eyes the moment the bright, hot lights overhead flooded her sight.

_No. Please, anything but this again._

She tried to raise an arm to see if it was true. Tight leather straps held it down.

_No. No no no. I have to wake up, I have to wake up or else—_

"It's awake."

"Shall I prepare the anesthesia, professor?"

"No need. After all, Subject AB-86 has already proven how resilient it is multiple times," the man said with a cackle, pressing a cold, greasy finger deep into the fresh scar in the center of her chest. She couldn't suppress the subsequent gasp quickly enough. "A resilient female at that, too! Odd that it presented itself as a male for a few years despite Shinra's foreknowledge, but no matter. I'll finally get to see what's special about this one." He seized her jaw and forced her to look up into his face. The faintest amount of transparency in his glasses allowed her to witness the malicious glint in his eye, the feverish excitement just barely palpable in his pupils.

"All vitals are normal. Eh, at least I think these are the vitals…"

He glanced over to the faceless assistant by one of the numerous, confusing machines surrounding her, his iron grip digging further into her jaw. An urge to bite him rose up within her, but she refused. That would only make him slice more.

He flashed another manic smile. "The CT scans suggested a good number of its organs are ones we've never seen before in a human. Isn't that exciting?"

"So we're dealing with something that's pretending to be human?"

"We can only hope so, the prospects are mouth-watering." He faced her again, still smiling. He only let go when one of his assistants offered him a tray full of medical instruments, instead directing his grabby hands toward a ridiculous-looking scalpel, never moving his eyes off of her. Cloud swallowed, knowing that it was always the first thing he reached for, remembering that it would be what he used to sever her intestines from their fleshy, stringy prison. "It's a shame your mother's no longer around to protect you, isn't it?"

_Mother… _For a moment she drifted away from her trap of frigid steel and leather, and a gentle warmth filled her, cradling her, letting her forget where she was. Then he made his first incision.

It was straight, down her abdomen. She screamed as blood rushed toward the surface of the cut, burning, boiling, like thousands of needles were inserting themselves into the layers of tissue beneath the skin of her stomach. Despite being aware of its futility, she strained against her restraints with every muscle in her body contracting, her spine arching above the operation table. The professor laughed hoarsely at the sight of her.

"It's not going to be as bad as what I normally do to my other specimens," he said casually, inching closer to her face as her head lolled. "I want to keep you in tact as much as possible. Wolf! Forceps!"

Everything went dark.

...

They were still cutting her apart when she came to. Only now they had the decency to cover most of their brutality with a blue surgical drape. She wasn't sure if it was worse to see all the faded blood stains on the drape or to see _what_ exactly they had done to her so far.

Either way, she felt it. So much of her was missing, and it felt like she was missing pieces of her mind as well. In her haze, uncertain of whether or not it was induced by drugs or her body's hormones in an effort to prevent shock from pain and blood loss, she began to drift away from her spot on the operation table, a vague flickering of wrath deep within her gradually worsening as she floated aimlessly in her subconscious' void.

_Someone has taken it. Missing. Missing. Missing. Need…whole…Who took it? Who took it? Emptiness. Hurts? It hurts it hurts it hurts. Emptiness hurts. Someone took it. Someone has taken it? Must become…whole…_

Her sudden rage emerged in the form of an ear-piercing, inhuman keen, startling the assistants flocked to either side of her. The lights overhead flickered. The professor, who was formerly attempting to dislodge a loop of her small intestines, stopped what he was doing and peered up at her with dull interest. A guileful grin was on his face.

"And that's what I was waiting for," he said, shoving aside the assistants, still frozen in their positions and mindlessly staring off into nothingness, on the left to cut a path to her. He lowered his gloved, slimy hands and held her head, forcing her to look up at him once more, thrusting her deep into his dark, manic eyes of detached madness. He dug his fingers into her cheeks farther the more she tried to pull away. "I knew she'd awaken if I pushed hard enough! The real challenge will be separating her from her vessel. I wonder…Can she see me through your eyes?"

Cloud spluttered and shook her head best she could, her senses inexplicably sharp again as if she had just woken up from a refreshing slumber. Her mind, however, was still a scrambled, blurry mess, and now, bizarre voices of unknown entities licked at her eardrums constantly, like she had freshly arrived at the gates of Hell.

She leaned forward, fighting her restraints, and said, "What are you talking about? What do you mean by 'vessel'?" Only afterward did she realize she shouted her words, perhaps in part from despondency at the entire scene, and possibly in part so she could hear herself over the endless voices.

"Shame that the vessel is still conscious—makes my job much more difficult." He frowned momentarily, but smiled again rather quickly. "Or…could it be that she's merged with this particular one and now thinks _she's_ the vessel? How interesting! There's only one way to find out." At that he snapped his fingers, and clueless, she was about to inquire yet again when something large, heavy, and wet, rupturing from where her colon used to be, cracked into shape, tearing muscles and membranes as it did so, pulling her flesh and fat, snapping bones, tendons, and ligaments, concentrating her tissues into its own monstrous form.

The last thing she heard was her own shrieking. Strangely animalistic. Painfully loud.

...

_Trapped. Lonely. Cold. Dark. Wet._

She couldn't feel most of her body. Whatever she did feel was wrong. Too much flesh. Warm, thick tentacles constantly coiled around arms, legs. There were so many limbs. Most of them she couldn't move, so they twitched against the ground, pointless and useless. A shackle around her neck prevented her from understanding what little she could of her present form, but she tried to look anyway.

Nobody she used to know would've been able to recognize her now.

Vaguely wing-like structures shielded her weak eye from what she saw. Of course, there was no point, as she couldn't escape her prison of flesh, yet the thought of her acquaintances, her own mother, Tifa—all of them, if they could see her now—recoiling in terror at the sight of her, wishing, hoping for her eventual death, possibly even trying to kill her—she cried out, wheezing slightly as the immense weight of herself strangled her lungs.

Drool seeped uncontrollably from her thin lips, a symptom of her lower jaw, raw and tattered, hanging loosely from the remaining muscles connecting it to her upper jaw. One of her eyes had fallen out, and her tongue had elongated, dangling out of a hole in the floor of her mouth and brushing against her scarred abdomen. Her teeth had grown without restraint and spurted from all angles and spots in her gums, eventually piercing what little skin covered her cheeks and chin.

She thought for a moment. Death would be better than this existence, a life condemned to being Hojo's lab rat, a life rendered meaningless after the Incident. Everyone she knew was dead, and so were all the people who could remember her. She didn't have anyone to think fondly of beyond her mother. Nobody would be wondering about her, why she went missing, what happened to her. Nobody would make sure she was okay. All because she couldn't save them.

She would die a nobody, not even given the leisure of a peaceful death. She lived a life that meant nothing to anyone, including herself. Forgotten. Useless.

She closed her eye. If she could've smiled, she would have.

_I deserve it._

...

A/N: just a quick, sort of abstract introspection into what's going on with cloud mentally, from my perspective. why's cloud a girl? well, why not?

constructive criticism is appreciated!


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